Freckles & Doubt

Today's subject line courtesy of more than usually surrealist spam. It only works as an acrostic if the formatting hasn't scrambled it, which it had, but I'm also amused by the random disconnect between the nature of the product and the choice of words.

I am currently locked in an epic battle with my contact lenses, or more accurately an advancing wave of contact lenses, bayonets fixed, all different. I wish to place on record here my jealousy of those of you who have (a) perfect vision, or (b) the ability to wear contact lenses all day without feeling the need to claw your own eyes out, screaming and scratching and convinced they are packing bayonets, after the four-hour mark. In the last seven or eight years my eyes have apparently developed interesting bumps inside the eyelids, and a tendency to under-produce tears, which means they tolerate lenses for a few hours before becoming bored, wriggly and fractious. (Great, my eyes are four-year-olds). This also means that in the last two weeks I've cycled through three different brands of trial lens, some of which are only mildly uncomfortable while others are screamingly annoying. My eyes really don't like wearing toric lenses, it seems, which is a bugger as the toric lenses correct the astigmatism and are necessary to prevent eye-strain headaches. It all seems tragically doomed.

I am somewhat amazed at the strength of my own disinclination to give up the whole thing as a bad job and embrace my inner Sarah Palin. It seems that I don't actually construct my ideal self as bespectacled. I'm actually wishing I had both the money and the courage to have the eye surgery. Sigh.

Today's September Retro Kiddielit entry, as promised to pumeza, is Eleanor Farjeon. I've always loved Farjeon's sweet, wistful and slightly oddball writing, in particular her two novel-length fairy tales, The Glass Slipper, which is a sort of innocent pantomime Cinderella, and The Silver Curlew, an utterly charming version of "Rumplestiltskin" with a spoiled-brat king who I adore. But the classic Farjeon stories are found in her Martin Pippin collections, Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard (available here) and Martin Pippin in the Daisy Field. These are Scheherazade-style excuses for tale-telling, frame tales in which the eccentric wandering minstrel Martin tells stories to an audience of girls or children. The frame scenarios are lovely, if a bit syrupy at times, but the stories themselves are wonderful. Farjeon has a very strong sense of English folklore and landscape; her tales are full of English place-names, plants, scenery, people and children's games. They have an incredibly strong folkloric backbone, with the correct and satisfying use of repetition, pattern, symbol and timelessness, but they're never obvious. The mood and tone of the tales are often slightly dark, and the narrative lateral and eccentric, apt to twist in directions you don't expect without ever losing its folkloric character. Apple Orchard is all love stories, befitting the milkmaids to whom they're told, and often surprisingly sexy; Daisy Field, with its audience of children, has more varied themes. My favourites include the Gothic darkness and symbols of "Open Wilkins" and the beautifully deconstructed courtly love scenario of "Proud Rosalind". My grandparents had copies of both Martin Pippin books, and the stories have always fascinated me, not least because I grew up with and into them; they were memorable and satisfying when I was a child, but they've offered more depth and interest with each reading as I became more able to access their considerable sophistication.

Last Night I Dreamed: I was a secret agent of some sort (extremely high heels were involved), in a very fast car with a nifty ability to drive along the underside of elevated freeways, thereby avoiding traffic. Later I was a medieval bride arriving at my potential husband's thatched cottage home, only to be utterly rejected by his mother, who stole my silver and sapphire ring before turning me out the house while said potential husband stood feebly by and let it happen.

Today's dose of Daily Voice tabloid surrealism:
HE JUMPED FROM EVIL TAXI - PIG.
I can't work out if I misread it driving past, or if the headline writers are actually on high-quality mind-altering substances. Also, I'm vaguely associating it in my mind with a headline a few months back, in which a pig stole someone's wallet, or something. This sounds like the pig's courtroom defense. I did it because he was clearly evil, yer honour, he was in an evil taxi!

I survived the weekend's SCA event, barely - it was successful, fun, completely mind-blowingly exhausting, and I'm ambivalent but generally relieved that I don't get to do it again for a minimum of two years, owing to self-imposed exile on grounds of ingrowing volunteerism and sanity retention. I spent most of yesterday unable to form sentences and more or less horizontal, watching cute kiddie movies. Fortunately, owing to my considerable finessing of this so-called "career" lark, I actually get to define the above as "work". I have the pages of notes to prove it, too. (Sentences not actually necessary for note-taking, fortunately). The score:

Enchanted. Surprisingly enjoyable; I'm sufficiently steeped in Disney and the gosh-darned musical format to derive considerable pleasure from a scientific dissassemblage and snarky parody of the more saccharine, stylised, unrealistic and twee aspects of same. Also, I have no problem with James Marsden sending himself up with enthusiasm for ninety minutes, he's very watchable. Also, bonus completely unrealistic, ironic, large-scale music and dance numbers in public places; they make me happy in the same way that Improv Everywhere does. I'm a girl of simple pleasures, really. In addition to the really complicated and pretentious academic ones.

Happily N'Ever After. During the course of this film I ate an entire tube full of candy-coated chocolate eggs that khoi_boi's nice wife incautiously left in our kitchen on Friday night. (She does this random Easter Bunny thing at this time of year, she always seems to have a stash of chocolate eggs somewhere about her person). The resulting sugar haze was barely sufficient to prevent me from the appropriate Vogon-poetic-auto-cannibalism. It's a dreadful little film, full of plastic people, plot kludges and a pale, struggling germ of self-consciousness fatally choked by stupidity. Bright spots: Hell's Angel witches on sort of speederbike things. Also, the heroine, while deeply irritating, looked very like tsukikoneko, which kept causing me momentary flashes of affection despite the character's irritation value. I am inclined to think, though, that I could have stuck with the analysis of the film I gave in the comments here, way before I'd actually seen it, and saved myself some toothache.

Shrek the Third. Nope. Still necrophilia. I didn't remember much about the film, hence the re-watch, but it turns out that was because my kindly subconscious had cloaked the whole thing in a merciful haze. I'm just grateful I didn't have time to rewatch Hoodwinked. Possibly this evening, when my tissues have restored somewhat and I'll be able to wash the taste out of my mouth with fine food at Africa Café.

This movie-watching is causing me intellectual irritation, like too much fabric softener in the undergarments. There's an underlying principle about contemporary fairy-tale film towards which I'm groping as I update this final chapter, but so far it's eluding me. It occurred to me that you lot are an intelligent bunch of people, you might spot any flaws in my reasoning here, since my brain is apparently rotted by too much cooking, insufficient sleep, and the incipient thumping of Sid the Sinus Headache. However, if this is not your cup of tea, feel free to magnificently refrain from clicking on the cut. ( Fairy-tale burblings lurk within! )

BoingBoing recently linked to the work of the amazing Shary Boyle, a Canadian artist who does beautiful, delicate porcelain sculpture which wantonly subverts its own pretty-pretty nature with some truly bizarre themes. The one above is a version of the Beast from Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête, who has always made my fluffy fairy-tale analyst's¹ heart go pit-a-pat, but there are some far more disturbing images there. Like this one:



In other news, today I not only achieved CV-updatage, I also found my Walter Benjamin reading, in exactly the pile it was supposed to occupy, near the top, in a position I have searched five or six times over the last week. Clearly the Alien Conspiracy is still at work. The nice Telkom man came and tinkered with the phone, but it's still going hiss spit.

Now I shall go forth and play the dreaded jo's roleplaying game, which has not met for lo these many moons. What were we doing? Something about ships, and balloons, and pirates... Oh, and offering khoi_boi's character violence.

¹ Or, in fact, my pervy eroticism-analyst's heart. Serious physical presence, that Beast.

Not for any particular reason, mind you, other than a more than usually wayward-puppy conversation with the Usual Suspects last night after the usual amounts of gin. Besides, it'll make jo happy. I seem to remember the consensus being that if an army of washable cthulhoid orang-utans accidentally ate Washington, America actually wouldn't be able to blame Iraq.

The conversation also veered randomly to Pratchett, thus alienating the sofa (stv and Tinnimentum, who don't read Pratchett, although otherwise they're very likeable), but gave the rest of us a quick workout on the perennial problem, viz. who to cast in the film version of any City Watch novel. Jo says Ralph Fiennes for the Patrician, I say Joseph Fiennes, whose beard and narrower face I prefer. We are utterly unable to work out who has the necessary craggy face and repressed anger for Vimes. I still think Carrot needs to be played by the bastard lovechild of Orlando Bloom and someone devious, but am not coming up with a sufficiently devious someone. Any suggestions? on any of the above?

Apart from being horribly filled with demanding academic research and writing, my life stretches bleak and desolate before me, on account of how the Evil Landlord had a small, restrained, Germanic wiggins on Monday night and packed up all his computer games into a large box, which he gave to Phlp with strict instructions not to return it under any circumstances. This means that I can no longer play ShadowMagic. On the downside, woe; on the upside, I'm certainly getting a lot more work done. I believe the house now contains only the Mist series, Oblivion and Morrowind, the latter of which is sitting innocently on my bookshelf waiting to be played as a Reward when I've finished the book. Sigh.

Department Of Random Dispatches From The Frontier: Tolkien says that in defining fairy tale "it is precisely the colouring, the atmosphere, the unclassifiable individual details of a story, and above all the general purport that informs with life the undissected bones of the plot, that really count." Is it just me, or is he being terminally vague?

In the Department of Self-Indulgent Morning Movies On My Own (a very significant pleasure in my life), I took myself off yesterday to see Monster House, muttering justifications under my breath about my academic interest in both animation and children's gothic*. Monster House is computer-animated, with a slightly plastic texture, but it works very well on a visual level: it's fun to watch the self-conscious horror atmosphere created artificially with creative camera angles, shadows and pans. The house itself is a marvellous, crouching monster, clearly the work of demented obsessives with a suitably paranoid visual imagination.

The story is told very much from the perpective of the three kids who are the protagonists, and I think the evocation of their world view works very well indeed, with moments of lovely humour and insight. Nonetheless, in its central theme and story this is not a kids' movie. Apart from its investigation of a very adult notion of emotional entrapment and obsessive relationships, the film is overall a rather despairing indictment of human prejudice and cruelty towards the abnormal: the grotesque is rendered monstrous solely through the sadistic and alienating responses it receives. The theme is carried on in subtext throughout the film, including a rather entertaining comic-con geek caricature. In the final analysis I'm not sure the film is entirely successful: it has the usual climactic-explosion-plus-feel-good-reconciliation ending, but it feels rather uneasily pasted over the seething gothic angsts which motivate the film.

Fluffy Escapism 2 was motivated by the fact that the Evil Landlord, who has been snuffling around the house for the last couple of days, has apparently infected me with his Evil Germanic Germs - I'm coming down with something bronchial, in spades. Miffed, and spurred on by the discovery of a couple of Exclusive vouchers in the bottom of my Handbag Of Doom, I went forth and acquired Ella Enchanted, the book, not the film.

I'm not mad about Gail Carson Levine's writing style, which is flat and awkward at times, but the reading experience has done that retroactive thing where I now like the movie less having seen what it could have been. The book is a rather attractive and at times subtle reworking of "Cinderella": its characters are a good deal more real and rounded than in the film, and definitely less inclined to political excess and overstatement. It was something of a shock to realise that the film created the evil uncle out of whole cloth: while I would have lamented the loss of Cary Elwes, his concentration of campy evil is exceptionally superficial compared to the novel's far more subtle exploration of power and difference. So, warning to everymoment, in particular: if you see the film, it's probably more enjoyable if you pretend it doesn't have anything to do with the book.

* The definitive paper on Lemony Snicket is still rootling around somewhere in my back brain, although I think it needs to await the advent of the last book, next month.

It's another in the ongoing series of Weird And Unlikely Movies I Watch Because It's My Job, Dammit! Tonight, Freeway! Or, Reese Red Riding Witherspoon Does Big Bad Kiefer Sutherwolf. Someone, I forget who, it may have been Phlp, warned me I'd hate this movie. How right he was. (Or she, if, in fact, it wasn't Phlp or anyone else of the masculine persuasion. My memory is bad at the best of times, and with this cold it's dribbled completely out of my ears).

Red Riding Hood, as fairy tales go, is generally a heaving cesspit of sublimated sexuality, violence and patriarchal Lolita-fondling dodginess (and that's even before you get into the New-Agey cosmic interpretations which insist that Red Riding Hood is Spring, Spring! or possibly Summer, emerging eternally from the belly of the winter-Wolf). RRH herself is a strange combination of childhood innocence and nascent sexuality, with that whole suggestion (see Gustav Doré) that she strays from the path because - gasp! - she's both terrified and fascinated, and ultimately wants to be devoured by the Big Bad. (A pause while I have sudden Spike flashbacks)...

No-one captured this edgy, sexy dualism better than Angela Carter, but I have to say, while I loathed almost every moment of Freeway, which is violent, grimy, grotesque and more than somewhat bleak, it does some dashed interesting stuff along the same lines. Reese Witherspoon's RRH figure, while sporting red hood and frankly incredible cutesy basket, is also a fascinating combination of street-wise ignorance, pragmatic violence, feisty self-reliance and the kind of bad-upbringing emotional and intellectual starvation which almost passes for naivety. Casting her as illiterate trailer-trash escaping from the attentions of her drugged-out whore mother's child-molester boyfriend is an extremely interesting light shed on the inherent sexualisation of Red Riding Hood's girl-child: she's no innocent, but in a sense her high degree of sexualisation makes her even more of a victim to the serial-killer wolf.

I like the way the film explores the Roald Dahl version of an empowered RRH, who does, in fact, at the psychological moment whip a pistol not quite from her knickers, and defiantly mark the wolf with the outward and visible sign of his inward grotesqueness. She's no pushover, this kid, and while you can't quite believe that the world has anything good lined up for her given the incredible deprivations of her upbringing, the wolf himself becomes a much smaller and less terrifying thing in the face of her defiant refusal to be victimised.

Interesting little film, all round. Of course, tomorrow I have to watch the sequel, which by all the rules can only be bad. On the upside, once I've thrashed out 500 words on the two films, I'll have - gasp! - only one more encyclopedia entry left to write! The end is nigh! *exits waving placard and predicting the apocalypse*

I got memed! I have Arrived, blog-wise. I was pinged by evil scroobious, naturally, who is a veteran of my literature seminars, so I suppose it's inevitable. I warn you, though, I shall cheat, and in some cases treat a whole series as a book. Rules, so boring.

The Number Of Books I Own. Good lord, now I'm going to have to count them. *pauses to fortify self with tea and toast*. Actually, probably a good idea to count them, anyway, for purposes of insurance, in case the Evil Landlord and I ever decide to burn the house down...

Okay. Fantasy/sf collection: just under a thousand. Fairy-tales and criticism: 200 or so. Plus the stuff in my office on campus, another 300 or so. Medieval history: almost 100. Detective fiction: 250ish. Mainstream novels, i.e. not sf/fantasy, around 500. Oh, and the PG Wodehouse in the living room: another 50ish. What's that? In total, I must own around 2500 books. Pshaw. Paltry. (If I count cookbooks, actually, that's another 100 or so).

The Last Books I Bought. Lemony Snicket, number 8, The Hostile Hospital, which, incidentally, is probably the best so far. Advance payment on the new Harry Potter. A. S. Byatt, The Little Black Book of Stories. Wait, I've just put in an Amazon order, so I suppose absolutely the most recent books I have bought (but not the last by a very long way) are The Sun, the Moon and the Stars (Steven Brust), The Family Trade and Singularity Sky (Charles Stross), and Distraction (Bruce Sterling).

The Last Book I Read: redundant question, on this blog, which mostly seems to be cultural criticism. As you know if you've been reading, it was Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World, Haruki Murakami. Or, if you want to count graphic novels as books, the first four in the Fables series. (I don't count all the Dick Francis. That's not reading, it's distraction).

Five Books That Mean A Lot: like scroobious, I meep plaintively, "Only five?", but, unlike her, proceed to cheat.

• JRR Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings; simple and obvious, but true. I read this first in the car travelling down from Zim to a holiday on the Wild Coast. I was 12. It completely overwhelmed and possessed me, despite the fact that I actually didn't understand a lot of it. I have re-read it an average of annually ever since, including sharp frequency spikes in my first year at UCT, when I was miserably and horrendously homesick and re-read it three times, following the action on photocopies of the maps. (Probably the first time I actually worked out what was happening in a tactical sense). I also re-read it four times over the three years during which the movies came out. This book, she says with calm understatement, means a lot to me.
  
• James Thurber, The Thirteen Clocks. Not for nothing are my cats called Todal and Golux. I deeply rejoice that I possess a first edition, which used to belong to my grandfather, who introduced me not only to Thurber, but to Tolkien and to sf in general. Look what he started. Any other Thurber fairy tales are also much-loved, especially The White Deer, but Clocks is my favourite.
  
• A. S. Byatt, Possession. And, in fact, the fairy tales in The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye and Elementals (the story "Cold" has huge resonance for me). Her writing is an endless delight because it's so layered, complex and evocative of other texts. Also, Possession both articulated and validated my very profound enjoyment of romance structures; it can't be that guilty a pleasure if a Booker prizewinner also does it.
  
• Sheri S. Tepper. Everything by Sheri S. Tepper. (This is where I cheat). I can't actually select one favourite above all the others. Her novels are important to me because they express feminism and ecology wossnames which are really important to me. She also has a highly acute awareness of story/narrative/structure. In fact, she pushes most of my buttons. Clever lady.
  
• Charles Dickens, Bleak House. I adore Dickens generally, and re-read them all frequently, but for some reason Bleak House has always been my favourite. I can't even say why.

Five is a ridiculous number. Left out of the above are a bunch of really important writers and books, including Jane Austen, Dorothy Parker, Susan Cooper's Dark is Rising series, and all of Terry Pratchett. I reject that five. I spit upon it!

Looking back over that list, it's interesting that I've managed to bring three of them into my PhD, and one into my Masters thesis. Cause-and-effect wise, it's not that they're important to me because I've worked critically with them; it's that I've chosen to work critically with them because they're important to me. I possibly have the world's coolest job.

One Book I Wish I Could Burn: scroobious pipped me on the Stephen Donaldson one, so I shall have to think of something else. Probably George Eliot's Middlemarch, a book for which I have a largely inexplicable, deeply passionate loathing. Or Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, although that antipathy is simply about circumstances of reading. Actually, thinking about it, I wouldn't actually want to burn either of the above; let's say a suspended torching, effective as soon as anyone tries to make me read either one again. I'm not generally big with the book-burning. I suspect that, given another year or two, I may be advocating it for JK Rowling and all her works, however...

You’ve been pinged. So I have. Now pinging... oooh (surveys blogdom with eye of connoisseur). d@vid, you're pinged. Stv (comovedy), so are you, because I don't know much about your reading taste other than Murakami ;>. Thak, you're pinged; stick it in a comment, if you don't want nameless hordes* rushing over to your blog.

* this is clearly a hopeless exaggeration. Dammit, scroobious, you've infected me with footnotes!

Help! I've been reading Baudrillard...

Good lord, I worked today. Have killed intro chapter. Annoyingly, I discovered that introducing a new, exciting, necessary argument halfway through the chapter in fact invalidated a lot of what I subsequently said, so I had to rewrite it. It's probably better now. I tell myself, ferociously. I still need to (cringe) track down Bruno Bettelheim in the library, productive of much aargh because he's a pretentious psychological critic who I do not grok. Also much aargh because it entails going up to campus, now seething with students and tragically bereft of free parking. Ah, termtime.

Also found time to finish reading the new Robin McKinley I bought last week - Spindle's End. Basically a novelisation of the Sleeping Beauty legend. She's maturing a great deal as a writer - Beauty, her first fairy tale novel, was cute and fluffy, but this, while having cute and fluffy bits (talking with animals, mostly), was quite interesting on the subject of narrative predestination and how damaging it can be. Not quite as savage as Deerskin was, but that's a much darker fairy tale (incest and rape). The gratifying thing being, of course, that reading McKinley also counts as work, since I spend a paragraph or so analysing her in The Dread Thesis, and what I've said is no longer valid, given how much she's matured. Sigh. *adds to list of revisions still needing to be made*.

Did I mention I've been reading Baudrillard? I've been reading Baudrillard. I have a headache.